Cloud service provider Backblaze has updated its earlier study of hard drive failure rates (Nov 2013)
in its own infrastructure – from 27,000 to more than 34,000
drives, and the new report (Sep 2014) is quite informative.
Hitachi comes out pretty high, Western Digital has produced some
good drives, but Seagate tends to come out worst. Each brand does
have good and not-so-good models so there’s no single right
answer, and for any new model you’ll always be dealing with an
unknown factor.

Some so-called “Green” harddisks don’t like being in a RAID
array. These are primarily SATA drives, and they gain their green
credentials by being able reduce their RPM when not in use, as
well as other aggressive power management trickery. That’s all
cool and in a way desirable – we want our hardware to use less
power whenever possible! – but the time it takes some drives to
“wake up” again is longer than a RAID setup is willing to
tolerate.

First of all, you may wonder why I bother with SATA disks at all
for RAID. I’ve written about this before, but they simply deliver
plenty for much less money. Higher RPM doesn’t necessarily help
you for a db-related (random access) workload, and for tasks like
backups which do have a lot of speed may not be a primary
concern. SATA disks have a shorter command queue than SAS, so
that means they might need to seek more – however a smart RAID
controller would already arrange its I/O …

As I described yesterday, Open Query is doing some tests on SSDs and other
devices pretending to be harddisks (SANs, battery-backed RAID
controllers, etc). To aid this, I wrote a small tool to test
the different kind of I/O operations MySQL would/could do, which
is not quite the same as what other general purpose apps would
do, and also not what other test tools measure. For
instance, it tries Direct I/O as well as fsync() after each
write, and also it a range of different I/O block sizes.

In a nutshell, it’s aimed to do what MySQL does, without
MySQL! Testing lots of different setups for this particular
purpose (even with fantastic tools like MySQL Sandbox) is a
complete pest, and changing InnoDB page size requires a
recompile. While Percona has tried a larger page size in the past
and decided it wasn’t worth it (the default is 16K), I thought it
worthwhile to include …

My father and I got our 5D MkIIs on Friday and we could hardly
wait for the batteries to charge. He took his to SF to test its
vaunted low-light performance and posted this 60-second 1080p
clip (along with other resolutions) on his SmugMug site: Click to
watch it auto-sized for your monitor or check out the
full 1080p resolution (caution – *high*
bandwidth! UPDATE: Apologies if you tried to
watch 1080p on Windows earlier. My bug made it look terrible. Try
again, please?).

Here’s his story:

“I had seen Vincent Laforet’s amazing short film, but only in
720p. I knew what an amazing photographer he is and wondered how
close an everyman like me could come to footage like that. Could
the clips …

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